Build System

make wrapper

For quick setup, the make wrapper takes care of setting up CMake automatically, and has quick commands for various tasks. It must be run from the Blender repository root directory. The most important commands are:

make help # List all available commands.
make full # Build with all features enabled.
make update # Update source code, add-ons and libraries to latest versions.
make test # Run automated tests.

Output

By default, make outputs the build and project files to to ../build_<platform>. The Blender executable will be located in ../build_<platform>/bin.

To change this location, see make help or manually run cmake. Be sure to generate the build files in a directory other than the source directory.

Customization

By default, the CMakeCache.txt configuration file will be in ../build_<platform>. Many CMake options can be set to customize the build.

The configuration can be edited using the CMake GUI (ccmake), or by manually editing CMakeCache.txt.

Build Files

For developers, the build system can be edited in the following files:

CMakeLists.txt throughout the source tree

./build_files/cmake/*

GNUMakefile and make.bat for wrappers

Setup for Developers

For efficient development of the Blender C/C++ code, install and set up an Editor or IDE to navigate and edit the source code. See the build instruction for each platform for more details.

We recommend developers to configure CMake to enable debugging features and tests. More details about tools for Blender development are here. The main options can be configured as follows with the make wrapper.

make debug developer

debug will make a debug build, and developer will configure CMake options for development, like address sanitizer.